Promotion of Capital Market Advancement in 2025
On the 31st, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) announced that it will steadfastly pursue capital market advancement tasks such as the corporate value-up program and the resumption of short selling in 2025.
On the 30th, the FSS presented follow-up tasks and a timeline for capital market advancement to be implemented in the first quarter of next year.
First, short selling will resume at the end of March. The FSS plans to publish an integrated guideline for short selling by January and complete the establishment of a short selling registration number issuance system. The integrated guideline will support the computerization of foreign investors such as global investment banks (IBs) and provide guidance on the registration number issuance procedures to short selling trading firms.
In February, an open forum will be held with market participants. In March, the FSS will check the preparation status of short selling firms and the stock exchange for the resumption of short selling and jointly hold a demonstration of the naked short selling detection process with the Financial Services Commission and the stock exchange.
The FSS explained, "Next year, we will continue to implement tasks to establish shareholder value-centered corporate management by supporting shareholder value-focused management and encouraging institutional investors' engagement activities."
Since there have been many recent institutional improvements such as merger and division system improvements, pre-reporting system for insider trading, dividend procedure improvements, treasury stock system improvements, and strengthened convertible bond regulations, a regional relay business briefing session will be held in February to provide detailed guidance on matters necessary for performing initial public offering (IPO) and securities registration statement preparation tasks.
In particular, ahead of the March general shareholders' meeting, the FSS plans to continuously encourage institutional investors' engagement activities starting in February. Through meetings with asset management companies, pension funds, and proxy advisory firms, additional measures such as incentives to strengthen independence, transparency, and accountability in the exercise of shareholders' rights by trustees will be discussed, and voting records by each management company will be compared and disclosed to encourage more active and responsible voting.
Support for legal amendments to improve corporate governance will also continue. The FSS plans to collect opinions on legislative amendments to strengthen protection for common shareholders by jointly promoting seminars and academic conferences with academic societies, and will cooperate on follow-up work such as supporting legislative discussions.
In April, the second meeting with activist funds and related institutions will be held after about a year. At this meeting, the FSS will share its analysis results on major engagement activities of shareholder activist funds and successful cases of cooperation systems between companies and activist funds in advanced countries such as Japan, and will promote necessary institutional improvements.
Additionally, support for improving capital market infrastructure, such as expanding English disclosures and early stabilization support for alternative trading systems (ATS), will continue.
In January, the English DART service will be expanded, and an 'Open DART' service providing major disclosure information as data will be launched. To enhance the quality of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) financial data, which is converted into English in real time, an 'XBRL Preparation Guide' will also be distributed.
In February, a joint briefing session with related institutions will be held to ensure the smooth launch and activation of ATS. Previously, an ATS operation seminar was held in May this year, and a joint briefing session for ATS introduction with related institutions was held on the 18th of this month.
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